How to Work Smarter

To a great extent, to increase your productivity, you must learn to work smarter. Chances are that you can’t add much more work hours to your schedule and you’re already working hard enough. Yet, you still aren’t as productive as you know you could be. Your remaining option is to become more effective with your work time. That is, you must learn to work smarter.

Working smarter isn’t as complicated as you may think. In a nutshell, working smarter means making sure the right tasks and activities are getting done. How can you do that?

1. Prioritize Your Tasks

To work smarter, you must place your energy and attention on the right tasks and activities. A lot of time is wasted on unimportant tasks and activities. If you can invest that time on high-value tasks and activities, you get a higher return on your investment of time and energy. And that’s smart.

All the items on your to-do list aren’t equal. You must give priority to the most important items. Your goals dictate which tasks and activities are most important.

2. Focus on Your Work

When you have established your priorities, you must focus on your work (starting with your most important tasks and activities). Being focused is vital; a lot of time is wasted on distractions and interruptions. If you’re able to insulate yourself from distractions and interruptions, you’ll get much more done and thus boost your productivity.

As with prioritization, focusing on your work is smart.

3. Use the Right Tools

Your tools can make or break you. Using the wrong tools simply makes your work needlessly more tedious. Plus, it slows you down.

When you use the right tools, you get more done (and the quality of your work is better). Your tools alone can really skyrocket your productivity.

Invest in good tools; it’s smart.

4. Leverage Others

Leveraging the expertise and experience of others is smart. That a task needs to get done doesn’t mean you’re the only one who can work on it; someone else can do it. And perhaps they can do it better and faster than you.

To work smarter, you must identify which tasks and activities you must absolutely get done yourself and which you can delegate to someone else.

By enlisting the help of others, you can easily double your productivity. And when they do the same by leveraging your expertise and experience, you have created a powerful collaboration.

To work smarter, you must learn to prioritize your tasks, focus on your work, use the right tools, and leverage others. Use these four simple strategies and you’ll see your productivity soar to unprecedented heights.